Borges and Borges

Apstrakt

A curious feature of Jorge Luis Borges’s body of work is its inclusion of numerous books he didn’t write but spoke aloud during an interaction. Into this category fall the many volumes of interviews, as well as Borges Profesor (2000), transcribed from tapes recorded by Borges’s students. By far the most crucial item is Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Borges (Ediciones Destino, 2006), 1,600 pages of diary entries spanning half a century of conversation, perhaps the single most intimate, detailed, insightful, and sustained record of one writer’s life and thought ever made by another. Though sometimes called Bioy’s autobiography, Borges is about Borges and also, in large measure, is by Borges, the oral Borges. The relationship between Bioy’s book and the writer whose name it takes as title problematizes and undermines legal concepts of originality, authorship, ownership, and selfhood. Copyright in the written Borges is held by a single entity, the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, whose longtime director, María Kodama, did what she could to suppress the use of Bioy’s book in scholarship on Borges. Copyright in the spoken part of Borges’s obra, however, is far more widely dispersed, held by numerous publishers, interviewers, and, in the case of Borges, the Bioy Casares estate. Intellectual property issues are rarely the focus of literary scholarship, but as Bellos and Montagu have recently argued, they are fundamental to any real understanding of how literature circulates globally, particularly during the decades since Borges’s passing. The ever-expanding legal framework that makes literature a heritable asset to be monopolized for nearly a century after a writer’s death has, in the case of the Borges estate, had “severe human costs” and severe creative costs (Chacoff). It has also placed a distance between Borges’s work, Bioy’s work, and Borges that is a disservice to scholarship and literary history.